Renaissance in Athens

How do you take a relatively sleepy, minor public university and put it on the map? Various college presidents have found their own way, but one of the most successful answers is now emerging in Ohio.

The state's academic map has long been dominated by such small private colleges as Antioch, Kenyon and Oberlin, rather than by the state's public universities. Except in football, huge Ohio State (37,000 full-time students) has seldom set the pace among its fellow Big Ten schools. Currently, something of the small colleges' quality and style is being achieved by State's little-known sister school, Ohio University, in the Appalachian town of Athens (pop. 4,700).

Status Symbol. The renaissance in Athens is largely the work of President Vernon Alden, 43, who has brought about such rapid growth that he now actually worries about his university's becoming "massive, monolithic and impersonal." That worry, of course, is today's major academic status symbol.

During Alden's five-year tenure, enrollment at Ohio U. has nearly doubled (to 15,000), more than $28 million worth of buildings have gone up, and an ambitious $205 million fund drive has begun. Alden has also enlivened the faculty by promoting outstanding teachers without regard to seniority and raising top salaries from $13,000 to $25,000, luring some professorial stars from both State and Ohio's private colleges.

To keep Ohio on the cozy side, Alden has turned to a solution that other universities have found satisfactory--dividing the large campus into small, college-like areas. Ohio U. has also created six smaller satellite campuses in nearby towns, with a prospective total enrollment of 22,000.

In order to stay in touch with his students, Alden holds twice-monthly breakfasts with them and semiannual conferences at which they can grill him on any topic they wish. He also plans to spend occasional nights in the dorms. Alden often shucks his glasses and joins students in a pickup basketball game on the court behind the presidential house. His kind of enthusiasm spreads to his staff. At many universities, says Fine Arts Dean Jack Morrison, things "slow down at the top--but that's where things begin to swing around here."

It is Alden's goal to "shape a university that's in touch with the real world." He has brought an impressive list of guest speakers to the campus, ranging from President Johnson, who spoke there on a war-on-poverty tour in May 1964, to the late Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. The university's select "Ohio Fellows," 30 members of each class chosen for their potential as future public leaders, have been able to quiz such officials as Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Alden has also defended the right of U.S. Nazi Leader George Lincoln Rockwell to be heard on campus, as well as the right of students to protest the Viet Nam war. His personal view, however, is that "I'm not much impressed by gestures--any darn fool can lie down in front of my office."

Like most self-respecting university presidents these days, Alden is active far beyond the campus. He headed the presidential task force that set up the federal Job Corps, has created an unusual service-oriented arm of the university, the Institute for Regional Development, to mesh with federal programs combatting poverty in Appalachia. Far beyond its region, Ohio U. has 19 professors training teachers in Nigeria, another 20 working on U.S. aid projects there, eleven performing similar chores in South Viet Nam.

Case Histories. The son of a Congregational preacher, Chicago-born Alden is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown, where he returned to help run its admissions office after World War II. As associate dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard from 1957 to 1961, Alden conducted a kind of clinic for university administrators, using case histories of actual administrative dilemmas as his teaching tool.

He is something of an evangelist for the role of the university in U.S. society. In the church, he says, "too many men of the cloth are becoming disenchanted." In government, "the politician is too engrossed in next year's budget." That leaves "only the universities as institutions that permit you to take a long look ahead." So long as Alden stays, Ohio U. will scarcely be allowed to look back.

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